China bans Youtube
reuters.com
reuters.com
The only mainstream site that's been consistently blocked is bbc news. Interestingly, no US news outlets are blocked. It always makes me wonder why.
Also, the major cities tend to have more liberal access policies than more remote areas.
This doesn't make me wonder at all.
The US and China were the two biggest allies in World War 2, became economically unified during the cold war to defeat the Soviet Union (remember the Soviet Union?), and now are the two biggest economic powers in the world. Don't look at official GDP figures, they're meaningless. Look at influence, manufacturing/logistical and financial power centers, and purchasing power parity.
After all, what is China but a United Provinces of Asia? You think 1.3B people are naturally part of the same country/culture/creed/flag? No fucking way, to think otherwise is racist ignorance.
Japan is quickly being usurped by Korea as well. Once the re-unification of Korea happens and there is a large source of inexpensive labor from the North for the developed economy in the South to employ, Japan will start its relative decline. They've already started to use Chinese manufacturing to remain competitive and leverage what's left of their engineering/design head-start given to them by the Marshall plan and previous Imperialist mindset.
The big picture, folks. It's always worth looking at.
The historic example of German re-unification does point in another direction..
It was the USSR and the US who were the biggest allies in WW2. China was a non factor. And after WW2, the US opposed Mao by supporting the losing side. The USSR supported Mao's revolution. Trade began between China and the US in the 70's but it was not part of a plan to defeat the soviet union. It only really picked up at the end of the cold war.
I don't think Japan is being usurped. If and when the re-unification happens, it will be chaos. South Korea just hopes it does not bankrupt them. Having a new source of inexpensive labor will not help Korea surpass Japan. China is close by and there is still plenty of inexpensive labor to be had there.
Also, its not like just Japan uses Chinese manufacturing. The whole world does including the US. Japans engineering head-start was not given to them by the Marshall plan(which was mostly directed at europe). They earned it starting in the 50's.
And at any rate, America's most major, most trusted ally in WWII and since has been Great Britain.
I suppose that if you grow up in a society where heavy-handed censorship is widespread in all media and even conversation, you'd accept it as normal and perhaps necessary. Self-censorship is even more effective and omni-present.
Note: I'm not claiming that censorship is absent in the West, but you'd be silly not to acknowledge that there's less of it.
One local told me that he wouldn't dream of giving an unfiltered Internet connection to many of his countrymen, as nothing in their culture has prepared them to deal with what they'd run into. Of course, he himself uses a VPN to dial out.
Sounds like class warfare. Same shit, different country.
Allowing populism to run a muck could lead to revolution, especially in a young and poor nation like China. Contrary to the romantic ideal of revolution we have in the West, in practice it is a bloody, miserable, and violent thing.
Call me a fascist, but I can understand the Chinese authorities' attempts to short-circuit anti-government movements. I can also understand popular support for such actions, given that the current Chinese government is more competent than all but a handful on this planet.
Also - I'm just trying to understand and explore their side here. I do enjoy living in a free society where I can support market anarchism and make frequent anti-government comments. I'm just not so much of an idealist to believe that American-style democracy is optimal for all places, times, and situations.
For example, I can understand why the Germans chose to ban Nazi publications in the wake of World War II, free speech be damned.
Censorship is not bad just because it's bad (like murder or assault). It doesn't usually hurt anyone directly. In fact it's trying to help. If heroin, fascism, homosexuality or anorexia are bad, why not work to stop them? To oppose censorship, you need to accept that in order to censor bad things, you need to have institutions that decide what is bad (don't we already have those?) and a means of blocking them. This will lead to bad things like censoring good things. There is no way around that, just like outrunning light. That's a pretty flimsy argument to make. If it hasn't been drilled into you, you probably won't accept it.
This isn't something that just people in the UAE or China will not 'get.' Australians today will not be convinced that banning pedophilia sites is a bad idea.
Try separating a debate about the legalization of drugs from a discussion about how harmful it is to take drugs.
Wait, where did you get that?
trouble is once you have a "great firewall" in place, it gets used to block whatever is convenient with no oversight.
I've also read about some very patriotic Chinese surfers that go around flaming anything that doesn't conform to the Party line. Same happens here in UAE.
From several indicators like this, I have assumed there's quite a bit of similarity between the two situations. The two national cultures are very different, but they both actively punish those who publicly differs from central authority, they both try to censor all media.
Anyway, while I don't think it's an issue with Turkey I expect China blocking YouTube might become a free trade issue.
The bans are about our archaic laws allowing anyone to claim any site for being a threat to our national unity. And these lawsuits usually end up with banning the whole thing. At some point even Blogger.com was gone (probably because some smart-ass didn't like one post and issued a suit).
And as for the inaccuracy of the write up, Youtube's status is quite flaky because of all the lawsuits against it - one after another. Even we lost the track of what's going on there - let alone the poor guy :)
Yes. The last time I noticed, it was about the sexual orientation of the republic's founder, Mustafa Kemal Attatürk. Is that still current?
Pay attention to want _isn't_ being said in the U.S. press about China. This will point you to the laundry list of things China is telling the U.S. to keep its hands off if it wants China to keep buying US$ debt.
There's a lot of precedent for this, too. The government blocked the whole iTunes store when a music single with the word "Tibet" in it hit the front page. They frequently ban news sites whenever news from Tibet (especially negative news) hits. It doesn't last forever, though. After things simmer down, they'll usually lift the general block and just keep targeted blocks on specific stories or pages.
I'm hoping YouTube comes back soon. Sometimes domains that were totally banned spontaneously become free and clear. Any blogs hosted by Wordpress were blocked until this last week. Now, no problem. Same thing with Andrew Sullivan's blog, and half a dozen other sites. I think it's just to keep people guessing.
IMO, if they're doing that, it's a very smart system of reducing dissent. I completely disagree with it, but then I grew up in a western country. I'm also not too ignorant to call China evil for doing so, they've made colossal strides in the past 50 years and perhaps in the long run this will be good for the country as a whole, potentially the worst thing that could happen is a civil war involving 1.3 billion people.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/12/world/asia/12beast.html?em